Good Calories, Bad Calories is not really a diet book, although it is listed as a best-selling one. Author Gary Taubes is an award-winning science journalist who set out to find the causes of America’s obesity epidemic. He believes that the obesity epidemic began when doctors came up with the premise that eating high-fat foods and animal products causes heart disease.
Taubes writes that for centuries people held a common sense point of view that if you eat too many sweets and starchy foods, you will get fat. He quotes passages written by Leo Tolstoy, Guiseppe di Lampedusa, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and others presenting that view. He points to Banting’s diet for diabetes and obesity that dates back to 1862. The rules were to eat three meals a day, with five to six ounces of meat, fish, or game at each meal, along with one ounce each of cooked fruit and stale toast. Another example is a 1951 British reducing diet that allowed patients to eat as much as they wanted of meat, fish, poultry, green vegetables, eggs, cheese, and fruit, but to avoid sweets, bread, cereals, potatoes, and white root vegetables.
It was only in the late 1950s that the advice changed when a few studies linked heart disease to a high-cholesterol diet. Taubes believes the research is still inconclusive, and points to anecdotal histories of heart patients like President Dwight Eisenhower who went on low-fat, grained-based diets only to gain weight and elevate their cholesterol levels. He presents statistics showing that those who go on cholesterol-lowering diets do not decrease their chances of dying from heart attacks by any significant percentage (less than 0.002).
Taubes believes the common sense wisdom of cutting out sweets and starches to lose weight still holds true today. We have always known that “bad calories” are in processed foods made from refined sugar and flour, such as sodas, pastries, cookies, and pretzels, and “good calories” come from meats and vegetables. In the last parts of the book, he challenges medical researchers to perform double-bind studies that will conclusively prove their theories relating to heart disease and cholesterol. This scholarly work includes hundreds of footnotes that refer to articles in scholarly journals.
See: Taubes, Gary. Good Calories, Bad Calories. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 2007.
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